


epilogue (where our eyes are never closing)

by Sedentary_Wordsmith



Series: the narrative [2]
Category: DC Extended Universe, DCU, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, can be read as slash or gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-04
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-07-25 08:39:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16193993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sedentary_Wordsmith/pseuds/Sedentary_Wordsmith
Summary: Clark learns about Illya Kuryakin, and the dead man whose face he wears.





	epilogue (where our eyes are never closing)

**Author's Note:**

> This part is an immediate sequel to the previous one, so it’s highly recommended to read “denouement” first. But you’re your own boss, so if you don’t want to, here’s a synopsis (spoilers!): Old!Illya meets Clark in a retirement home and mistakes him for Napoleon, who died fifty years previously, and then proceeds to confuse and alarm him with talk of Spy Business. It’s all very angsty and sad.
> 
> Title from Photograph by Ed Sheeran, whose lyrics I discovered on accident while looking for a totally different song.

Superman is just handing over a would-be mugger to a pair of grateful beat cops when he feels his communicator go off in his hidden pocket. One buzz, a message, not the persistent buzzing of an emergency call. He accepts the officers’ thanks with his All-American smile and almost forgets to give the thief a stern word about turning his life around before he’s taking off, floating a few hundred feet up into the empty sky to check the anticipated message.

_Have results_ , reads Bruce’s text, ever succinct. And really, it could be referring to just about anything, as Bruce is constantly running no end of tests and experiments, but Clark already knows exactly what he means. He hadn’t exactly seemed thrilled with Clark’s initial request ( _“I have more important things to do with my time than run background checks on octogenarian invalids”_ ) but Clark knew that his sincere appeal (some might even call it pleading) as well as the draw of the mystery would be enough to eventually lure Bruce in. His own attempts to dig up information on the aging and mysterious Mr. Petrov had come up blank and suspiciously clean. 

“Maybe he really is just that boring,” Bruce had dryly suggested when Clark had expressed his dissatisfaction.

“No, you weren’t there,” Clark denied, frustrated. “He was talking about missions and aliases and saving the world with his partner.”

“Boring and senile, then.”

Clark ignored him. “ _I_ think he used to be some kind of secret agent and ‘Petrov’ is the cover name they gave him so he could retire safely in obscurity.”

“‘They’ who?”

“The secret organization he worked for,” Clark said, trying hard not to let his exasperation show in his tone despite Bruce’s being willfully difficult. “He’s clearly Russian, so the KGB maybe? Although his partner’s name was Napoleon, and that doesn’t sound very Russian.” 

“Truly a fascinating mystery,” Bruce replied, giving the impression of rolling his eyes without actually doing it. He turned back to the Cave’s computer. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out, being a top-notch investigative journalist as you are.”

Clark followed after him, floating a little over the desk so Bruce would be forced to see him at least from his peripheral. “I told you, I already exhausted all my resources and I can’t get any further than this. ‘Ivan Petrov’ comes up clean in all the ways I can look him up. Too clean. Whoever created the alias did a very thorough job. I need someone who can get around the systems and dig up past Petrov to whoever he was before.”

Bruce finally turned and fixed him with an assessing look. “Why do you care so much? Is this all just idle curiosity?”

Clark blushed a little and landed back on his feet, forcing Bruce to turn his chair to keep him in sight. This was the part he hadn’t really wanted to admit to. “He may have…mistaken me for his dead partner. And I may have gone along with it a little to get him to tell me more about his past.”

He darted a glance over to check Bruce’s expression and felt his face warm even more at the wry amusement sparkling in his eyes. “So the Boy Scout is feeling guilty,” Bruce concluded with a smirk. “And so you’re prying further into his past to assuage your guilt? I’m not entirely sure that’s how it works.”

“I know it doesn’t make sense, okay? I just…feel like maybe I owe it to him somehow,” Clark replied, struggling to articulate the emotions churning through him. “I feel like someone else should remember his partner and all the sacrifices they made.”

Bruce’s smirk dimmed, settling into something softer as his gaze determinedly did not drift over to the glass case in the corner. “Fine.” He hurried on before Clark could get too excited. “I make no promises. I have a lot of much more important things to handle first, but _if_ I get a spare minute, I _might_ see what I can dig up.”

Clark made sure to thank him effusively, knowing that Bruce was as good as hooked now and would definitely find something—if there really was anything to be found. 

Now, an excited grin breaks over his face and he clicks his communicator back off before taking off for Gotham just under the speed of sound. He trusts Bruce to know he’s coming and have the Cave’s security measures disabled long enough for him to pass as he flies through the tunnels and emerges into the open main chamber. Bruce is sitting in front of the largest computer screen, fully armored in the Batsuit except for the cowl which rests on the desk next to him. 

“I finally had a spare minute so I did some digging into your Mr. Petrov,” he says by way of greeting, as though Clark doesn’t already know that’s why he’s here. 

“And…?” Clark prompts obligingly.

“And…you were right.” 

“Wait, really?” Clark asks before he can stop himself, a little stunned that his secret agent theory was actually true.

Bruce hits a key on his computer and a file pops up on the large screen as he turns to watch Clark’s reaction. He floats closer, wide eyes taking in the abundance of information presented to him. There’s a scanned copy of a typewritten dossier with the heading of U.N.C.L.E. and in the corner, a black and white photo of a much younger version of the man he had met at the retirement home. “That’s definitely him. The scar by his eye is the same,” he murmurs distractedly, scanning over the typed information. Illya Kuryakin. 1931, Moscow. KGB. Surveillance. Disturbed Childhood.

Bruce half turns back to the computer, clicking through several more pages, heavily blacked out. “Most of the information I could find on him is almost entirely redacted. Top secret stuff, and they didn’t keep digital records of these things back then. But I found enough to piece together a loose timeline. He was originally KGB, their top agent, before he was pulled to be part of this U.N.C.L.E.—the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” Clark says, reading through the few scattered words not blacked out on what appears to be a mission brief about reclaiming a stolen bioweapon.

“No, that would be where the ‘secret’ part of ‘secret spy organization’ comes in,” Bruce replies and Clark takes his eyes from the computer screen just long enough to shoot him a glare. “It was formed in the 60s during the Cold War, an unprecedented display of interagency cooperation made up of some of the very best spies from America, Russia, England, and various other allies, until it was eventually dissolved in the late 80s. Your Mr. Petrov here made up one half of U.N.C.L.E.’s best team of field agents.”

“And the other half?” Clark asks, a strange feeling bubbling up in his gut—half anticipation, half an unexpected dread at what the computer might next show him.

Bruce hits a button without looking, keeping his steady gaze on Clark’s face as the next dossier comes up on the screen. Clark feels his mouth fall open. “Frankly, I don’t see the resemblance at all,” Bruce drawls. 

“It’s…me,” Clark sputters nonsensically. He knows it’s not. The man in the picture on the screen, although wearing his face, bears himself with a suave confidence that Clark Kent can only dream of. Even Superman couldn’t hope to pull off a three-piece suit that well.

“Don’t be ridiculous. He doesn’t look anything like you. For one thing, he doesn’t wear glasses.”

“Bruce.”

Bruce drops the sarcasm, turning fully back to the screen to pull up several more documents. “Napoleon Solo. American, originally CIA. Kuryakin’s partner until he was killed in action in a mission gone wrong in Lyon, France, in ’68. Honestly, it’s no wonder Kuryakin confused the two of you. Even without the dementia, you could be twins.”

“Dementia?” Clark asks sharply, despite the sinking in his gut. He had already suspected as much.

Bruce flips back to Kuryakin’s file, pulling up various medical and psych reports. “It shouldn’t come as a surprise. He had a slew of diagnosed disorders even back in his prime. And he _is_ getting up there in years,” he adds, surprisingly gently. 

Clark sighs, feeling an odd attachment to the man he only met once and had talked to for no more than fifteen minutes. Maybe it was the way Kuryakin had looked at him, like he had found a priceless treasure he had thought long lost. Maybe it was the clear pain in his eyes when he remembered the events in Lyon. Clark feels himself inexorably drawn to him, pulled in by his loss.

This would be his bleeding heart that Lois is always warning him will get him into trouble and his mother is always telling him keeps him human. 

“I should go see him again,” he says aloud.

“And what do you hope to accomplish by doing that?” Bruce asks, his disapproval clear in the frown he directs at Clark.

“He thought I was his dead partner, Bruce.”

“And you think it’s a kindness to foster that delusion? It’s a lie,” Bruce returns steadily, though steel runs through his voice in an undertone. “He’s clearly seen and been through a lot in his life, and some people…their minds do what they can so they can cope and live with it. It doesn’t mean you’re helping him by letting him believe his partner is still alive.”

“You didn’t see him, Bruce. You don’t know what he needs. Maybe he needs that spark of hope. Not everyone can live with a glass monument to their loss and thrive on self-flagellation.” As soon as the words are out of his mouth, Clark wishes he could stuff them back in, but the ability to rewind time by ten seconds isn’t a superpower he’s discovered yet.

Bruce’s mouth thins into a flat line and he spins back around in his chair to face the computer, wiping the U.N.C.L.E. dossiers off the screen and pulling up a GCPD crime report.

Clark sighs. “I’m sorry, Bruce. I didn’t mean—”

“I have work to do,” Bruce interrupts, fingers steady over the keyboard as he types up a comment under a grisly crime scene photo.

Clark knows better by now than to make the situation worse with further conversation, and wordlessly shows himself out the way he came in. Bruce will forgive him and the words will be forgotten by the next time they see each other. Despite their rough start, they’re something like partners now, and that’s what partners do.

* * *

Back in his flannel and glasses, Clark returns the next afternoon to the retirement home where he met Illya Kuryakin. He pops his head into the sitting room and scans the occupants, most of them sleeping with their chins tucked to their chests or occupying themselves with knitting, he notes with an amused smile. The table with the chessboard on it is vacant, all the pieces missing. 

He heads to the reception desk in the front hall, figuring Kuryakin might be in his room napping. That’s something octogenarians do, right? 

“Excuse me, I’m looking for Mr. Kur—Mr. Petrov? Ivan Petrov. Is he in his room?” he asks the nurse stationed there.

“Oh, of course, I remember you.” The nurse smiles at him and he thinks he might vaguely recognize her as the one who brought Kuryakin his pills while they were talking. “You were the first visitor Mr. Petrov had since he was admitted here.”

“Really?” Clark asks, a little dumbfounded. He doesn’t know what interpersonal relationships are like in the spy community, but he had thought at least someone would check up on him every so often, to keep an eye on a previous asset if nothing else.

“I guess it’s not too surprising. He didn’t have any family to speak of and he could be right prickly most of the time. But deep down I’m convinced he was just a big old teddy bear.” She winks.

Clark almost smiles before a cold knot of discomfort suddenly settles in his stomach. “You’re…speaking of him in the past tense.”

Her smile falls. “Oh. I’m sorry. Mr. Petrov passed away. The morning after you came to visit him, actually. I’m so sorry.”

Clark grips the edge of the desk, almost forgetting to mind his strength as he flounders for words. “Passed away? But it’s so sudden. Was he sick? Did something happen?”

The nurse’s eyes are kind and full of gentle sympathy. She’s done this before. “Honey, he was just old. Old and had a long, hard life, and sometimes the body just decides it’s time to let go. It happens, you know?” She pats him gently on one of his grasping fists and he consciously eases his grip before he can break off a piece of the desk. “He went peacefully in his sleep, no pain. In fact, after your visit, he was the happiest I’ve ever seen him. You should take comfort in that.”

Clark dredges up a smile from somewhere. “I do. Thank you. It’s…nice to know he’s at peace now,” he says, and surprises himself to find that he means it. After everything Kuryakin had been through, the number of times he had saved the world, the sacrifices he had made and the pain he had seen and the loss he had felt, he deserves to finally rest, to have some peace. And if there’s any sense of right in the universe, he’ll have found his partner—his real partner and not just the shallow illusion of him—again at last. They’re together again, as they should be. 

Clark likes to think so—that if Illya Kuryakin can find peace, then so can someone else who’s intimately familiar with pain and loss, one day.

“A couple of gentlemen in black suits already came and claimed all of his personal possessions,” the nurse is saying and Clark is pleased on behalf of Kuryakin, that he hadn’t been entirely forgotten by his previous agency after all, “but he left this for someone named Napoleon.” She holds out a sealed envelope to him, the single name written on the front in neat, blocky letters. “Is that you?”

“Ah…yes.” He feels supremely guilty lying in order to claim what’s probably an incredibly personal letter from one dead man to another, but if he doesn’t then it will inevitably just end up in the trash and that’s even worse. “Thank you.” He tucks the letter into his flannel’s breast pocket to decide what to do with it later. “Sorry, but would it be all right if I saw his room?”

The nurse smiles again. “You’re in luck. Normally a resident’s room would have been cleaned out and set up for the next resident by now but we’re a little short staffed at the moment so everything is as he left it. Except for what those other men already took, of course.” 

She points him down the hall and he follows the signs to room 207, not entirely sure why he’s doing this or what he hopes to find with all of Kuryakin’s personal possessions already removed. A large part of him, whether the investigative journalist or the man who accidentally wears Napoleon Solo’s face, rebels at the thought of not paying his respects to the four walls that saw Kuryakin’s last years, that heard his last breath.

He hesitates a moment outside the door before pushing it open and stepping inside. The room within is bland and entirely bare of personal touch. The twin bed in the corner is neatly made and covered with a clean white comforter. There’s a nightstand beside it and a writing desk on the opposite wall, both similarly bare. The closet is empty of clothes and imprints in the carpet beneath show where there had been a stack of boxes, now gone. There are no toiletries in the attached bathroom or artwork on the walls, though there are a couple of nails hanging bare. On closer inspection, Clark’s sharp eyes catch disturbances in the minute layer of dust on the desk, where a couple of picture frames might have sat. He wonders what was in them, what kind of pictures a retired Russian spy might have kept for himself. 

Clark sits on the edge of the bed, absently patting and smoothing the comforter. There’s nothing else for him here—until he remembers something Kuryakin had told him during their one brief conversation, about making modifications, and, on instinct, scans the room with his x-ray vision. He’s not entirely surprised to discover that the back wall of the closet is false, but is a little shocked at the sheer number of hooks and shelves that had presumably once held all manner of firearms and munitions. Those too are gone now. The agency had been very thorough, it seems. 

He glances around the rest of the room, looking for more hiding spots, discovering a handgun hidden in the back of the desk that the agency had apparently missed after all, and a thin hidden compartment in the side of the nightstand next to him. He fumbles with and pushes at the board until it pops open, and carefully extracts the photograph hidden there. 

The photo is in brilliant color, probably taken right around the time color film was becoming more widespread for everyday usage, and shows a backdrop of some European city Clark can’t identify. In the foreground, clearly unaware of their picture being taken, stand Solo and Kuryakin. Solo is in the middle of gesturing expansively, his eyes alight with the story he must have been telling, and Kuryakin is half turned toward him, a small smile on his face with a soft look that hadn’t been present in any of the other photos Clark had seen of him. 

What had they been talking about? What thoughts had been going through Kuryakin’s mind then as he looked at his partner? Had they just completed a successful mission? Clark wants to know the story. He wants to know what happened next, when they discovered their unnoticed photographer. Did they tease each other about being caught off guard? Were they secretly pleased to have this moment captured in time despite the risk it might have posed for their covers? Clearly it meant something at least to Kuryakin for him to have kept it all these years. Did Solo have a copy too, once upon a time?

Clark reverently tucks the photo into his pocket behind the letter that’s been burning a hole through his shirt. He knows himself well enough by now to be aware there’s no way he can leave it unread. He can (and will) make as many justifications as he needs, but ultimately it’s his incorrigible sense of curiosity that has him carefully prying open the sealed envelope. 

The handwritten words inside are Russian, which is unexpected but not too surprising once he remembers Solo’s file listing it as one of the several languages he spoke. It’s no problem for Clark. (He suspects that even Bruce, who is fluent in more languages than any other human he’s ever met, is secretly a little jealous of the speed with which Clark can pick up new tongues.) 

The letter is also rather shorter than Clark was expecting. He doesn’t know what the requisite number of pages is for a letter from a man on his deathbed to his long-dead partner, but this is definitely less. He reads it once, then again, but it doesn’t make any more sense the second time through. 

_Napoleon,_

_It was good to see you again, Cowboy. I do not know how long it has been but this ache in my chest tells me too long. I know you said you would come and see me again, but this time it is my turn to come to you. Meet me under the stars in the place where I first learned of the real you. I will wait for you there. I have another secret to tell you, one I should have told you long ago._

_Peril._

The obscure references, the abrupt ending and vague warning(?)—the real Napoleon probably would have understood them instantly. Clark feels like more of a cheap imitation than ever and guiltily folds away the letter and returns it to its envelope and his pocket. It’s impossible to tell if Kuryakin knew he was dying or if he really believed he was about to travel to some destination he’d known fifty years ago and meet up with his partner again. His mind had been in chaos, caught between the present and past and there’s no telling now how much of actual reality he had perceived. 

Either way, he’s at peace now. Either way, Illya has found Napoleon again. That will have to be enough for Clark, for the small dissatisfied part of him that wants more, that wants better. 

He stands and leaves the empty room, switching off the light and closing the door behind him.

**Author's Note:**

> Is Illya actually dead or did he fake his death to go find Napoleon (and which one is sadder)? I’ll leave it up to you to decide.


End file.
